


I don't scream: I call you softly.

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bittersweet, Character Study, F/M, Gallifrey, Introspection, Not Beta Read, Pompeii
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 06:53:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1377955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the trials, River doesn’t remember whether she killed the Doctor or not. He is the phantom echoing her footsteps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I don't scream: I call you softly.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [leiascully](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/gifts).



> -Happy late Birthday,[Leiascully](http://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully)!  
> -I’m sorry.  
> -Greatly inspired by _Hiroshima, mon amour_ by Marguerite Duras. Title from the same.  
>  -AU: this is no headcanon, it varies greatly from my personal canon-headcanon, but it still was something worth exploring.  
> -Time-line: The Doctor is post-Manhattan, pre-Snowmen. River is pretty much immediately after The Wedding of River Song. Spoilers for The Day of the Doctor.

It rained on Pompeii that day. Rain drops on hands are ridiculous; they are warm and undecided. He holds, sensing the water puddling in the cave of his fingers, before escaping. He fidgets too much. But when he holds River’s hand, the water has time to warm there.

Between _insulae_ , he found her by accident while she was tweaking reality with breaths and caresses. The walls wore a make-up of sort, plaster upon reparations, continent-like, trying to keep time from running out of cracks and ivies. It was ugly at times, but River busied herself in the unbiased mapping of the old and the new, her fingers filling gaps with their own stock of sand and dust. River was always wearing dust on her fingers.

The chances for him to meet her precisely on the day he wandered around the antique city were nil. The TARDIS had been warned a few days before about the grounding she would risk in case another timed encounter with River occurred. Seeing her hurt these days. He kept finding her all the same.

Her unmistakable profile was standing out against a rare opening of light in a shop courtyard. The modern roof was keeping her and the faint fresco in the dark. It was a small building, red, dry despite the humidity. In the centre, where River was standing, he could make out a low counter, pierced with large holes, the content of dust and pine needles obviously captivating. Her hands were threading the large stone pieces of the surface, flat and spread out.

He secured himself a path between the tourists gawking and snapping, gingerly, not willing to find her already, but quite aware of how he would have to face her. Manhattan had not been easy, for neither of them, last milestone maybe before their night at Darillium. He was keenly conscious of how squandered their past had been, by himself, by her own bravado. He found himself more than ever determined to seek her backwards, younger, to spare the few times he still had with his professor. It was all but smoke; he missed her terribly.

She had caught his careful progression in the crowd and was smirking without a glance for him, studying the large earthenware jars, colourless. The tourists avoided the interior, cold and isolated, in an afternoon where the sun was barely warming the streets. He slid behind her, taking in with relief her attire under the thin grey coat; Stormcage’s customary uniform, tank top and green pants, filth courtesy of the perpetual drench. She was young then. Probably on the run from prison.

He smiled, probing the mass of hair with the tip of his nose.

It was shorter than he ever remembered seeing them, above her shoulders, a shade darker. His hearts fluttered slightly at the realisation this might be a River he never was exposed to; she still could surprise him. Titillated, he placed a confident hand on her hips, albeit treacherous since the vagueness of her coat distracted his attention and brought his hand closer to her groin. An encouraging purr sipped through her lips and he hummed in response. Timelines thus cleared, she breathed out sharply before leaning into him, grazing his neck with her own through the thick tendrils.

“What do you find in Pompeii?” she asked, content.

His arms properly encased her, round the ribs, across the chest, her head only free to roll on his shoulder.

“Ashes, paved streets, olive trees.”

She sniggered.

“Archaeologists.” Her hands at last abandoned the cold stone she had been assessing and came up to his arms. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t remember exactly. I came here, that’s all.” He looked askance, drinking in the profile the angle was conceding him, struck by his own restraint. He wanted to turn her and photograph her face for the rest of the afternoon. “You?” He managed not to plead.

“I escaped under rather unusual circumstances, even for me, and I am a little stranded here, at the moment.”

“Do you want a ride home?” He felt her stiffen in his arms but brushed it off, because _oh, please. Not more spoilers._ He was supposed to hold all the cards, not her, not at this point.His body did not move, refusing to severe the contact. She had been ruthless while he was the one running away from her. There was no reason to spare her. He stood his ground, letting it known to her home was something _they_ had agreed on, not a mere phrasing. She calmed in his arms.

Steadily, as if between communicating vessels, she evened her tensing, matching his, and answered, voice undisturbed.

“That is terribly irresistible of you but I am already waiting for a friend to pick me up.” A breath tickled the side of his nose. “She went off a long way to find me, standing her up would be plain rude.”

“Okay,” he simply said. River asking to go out on a field trip with her friends. The words were familiar, flung over the console room, while he was brushing his teeth, River a towel around her head. A dead fast-food was certainly not the most unexpected place to witness such small talks. Some habits had always been in place, it seemed.

His hands nonchalantly slid down her arms, unfolding them. His left hand breached contact, and he heard her sigh, but promptly found her hip, caressed the small of her back while drumming across to reach her right hand. Their fingers naturally entwined and he almost cursed himself for wondering why River was so docile in their proximity.

It was like finding a missing link between the passionate maiden he had (almost) married and the seasoned lover of Utah. With a tug of the hand, he led her out of the shop, down a narrow street, less crowded. He didn’t have to ask her for a walk. She read it on his fingertips.

“Is that a hat? I thought hats were forbidden in Pompeii.”

“Not before a good thirty years, Sweetie.”

They roamed the streets, paying very little attention to the ruins both of them were regular worshippers. Rather they would find great delight in avoiding and startling tourists, leaping from behind a crumbled wall. River felt different, somehow clinging to his hand, somehow more attentive to his gestures. Anticipating his every move in a way she saved for tracking foes, but with uncertainty there. She never treated her enemies with uncertainty.

He did not complain about the hand never leaving his. Even this young.

River not whisking out the diary from one of her large pockets was only too glaring a proof of her youth. He was not in the mood for bantering around any of their past encounters with her. His worry could be entirely cocooned by her presence, by the fact she was very simply River in Pompeii. Walking with her hand in his and satisfied with the state of things. Unmoving, unquestioning, even if not whole.

They halted before the frozen bodies, sleeping in life, curled in, and generic in the roughness the moulding had bequeathed them. Almost alive.

Statues have flesh more real, veins refined like bracelets, tender stomach adorned with thin drapes that mirror the softness in their hair and carved gazes. The dead of Pompeii have teeth set in stone and no more fingers clutching at their throat. Time had stopped, instantaneously pumiced them for eternity.  

“It feels like being here.” The confession sounded wrong, gingerly childish. Her curls kept getting in the way of her eyes.

He should have taken note of her phrasing.

“You were not.”

He was not thinking about Pompeii.

It struck him he had committed a crime immense of which he did not grasp the mechanics. What did they look like those faces burnt in eternity and that no one would ever dig out? Did they know they were dying? Were they even dead? The Pompeians had known. His mind was being puerile and River was holding his hand too tight when looking at the skin-less statues, human recording tapes, damaged beyond reading by the very process that changed them.

When Gallifrey burnt, he held his breath, closed his eyes and obstructed his ears. Blocking everything that could permeate him from this moment.

He recorded nothing. Last witness of the greatest of civilisation, and each remembering was inconceivable past the moment he sealed Gallifrey.

He let them in a jar, buried deep and in shame, and let them corrode in the confined space of his guilt and memory. It swelled out, gasping, heaving, and plugged out at last, swept his mind. Flooding and burning. Some friends would say he needed to do it.

River would simply brush a strand of hair from his brow. River understood counting the lives saved by killing never had been their tally to do.

The day night fell on Pompeii, fire ran towards the town. The night an entire town’s breath was taken away, lungs by lungs, suffocated, burnt. They had known they were dying. He didn’t grant such a privilege to his friends and family.

“I was there,” he repeated, dryly.

River was silent, face turned away. And he had not considered her eyes as closely as he wanted before. He held out his free hand towards her. She drifted rather than walked away from the spot, dragging him deeper in the town, under barriers and fences. Damp afternoons are not supposed to be this dusty. It caught in her hair, dirty veil, and stuffed his throat.

She was avoiding looking at him.

They stopped on a corner deserted by the sun, balancing on the sidewalk. His shoes were slippery and he ended up on the paved road. From the elevated sidewalk, River was not letting go of his hand, overlooking. Her nose had a funny colour.

He almost asked her if anything was wrong. Instead decided, he felt alone and ought to do something about it.

Alone, out-of-place feeling around River.

So he did something desperate and something sweet. Pulling a little on her arm, he graciously plucked a flower that was bearing its head above the pavement. It was a small, dry flower, darkened by the water unceremoniously dumped on it. He cleared the stem from bracts, lifted her right hand, made a loop round her ring finger and secured a knot as mint mark. He contemplated her bejewelled hand with a sheepish look that only held her curious expression in place. A tentative smile spread his lips.

The beat of steps in the distance, more tourists sweating their boredom for a past they could not grasp.

Her features did not soften and worry churned under his tongue.

“We’ve done Lake Silencio…”

She swallowed.

“I did.”

“How many times?” His voice was hoarse.

She briefly closed her eyes, as if accepting a blow. His fingers trailed a path of sweat down her thumb, while his eyes were not releasing her face.

“The first time.”

He stepped closer, her nose at eye-level. Head thus tilted down to him, hair too short, hand too clenched, hearts too open, she looked a child River.

“I don’t understand. You and I, we, we…”

“You are dead.” It sounded like a beat. Something fallen and once missed.

He froze.

The dust was annoying his breath more and more, finding mean ways to itch the creases under his eyes. He dove headfirst into the realisation, used to frequenting the worst when it came to River.

 _She didn’t remember the alternative timeline._ He was dead to her.

“If you _remember_ Lake Silencio, then there is nothing real about you.” She was talking to herself, bringing her other hand to his head, shaping a curl on his temple. “I’m sorry.”

She was deadly tender. Because she looked like she was loving him even then, dead, and her hand was still nestled in his. He came to his sense at last; she had looked through him the whole time. Her grip was only a mean to override her intellect, to focus her fantasy on one contact, easily maintained, easily feigned and upon which she could create a whole body, _his_.

She didn’t remember.

Her taking absolute control of the suit had never happened, the wedding had never taken place, and she never had the chance to stand up to him. Not for her. Something this huge, this essential, and he had never considered she could not remember. His hands were unmistakably damp.

“River, I don’t, I...” He could not cry to her face he was alive, out of shock, out of caution. He could trust her mind to _mimic_ his voice perfectly. His words would be vain. Instead, he seized her hands, lifting them to his face, before letting them drop, defeated. Her eyes had passed on them as on dead-weights. She seemed alarmingly calm about their situation, content even in touching his ghost. Her eyes were quite lost in dream, while she resumed her balancing on the edge, leaving in the gutter.

The tourists were always finding them in the streets, besieging. Aside, he pushed her to ruins of a ruin, rubbles out of which not even archaeologist could virtually erect a shop. Backed into half a wall, she let him isolate her from the world. Her attention was fleeting, as if studying the curve of a marble, anywhere but his eyes. She would have found utter panic. He could read love in hers.

“I am alive.” The words rolled in his dead language only she could read.

He squeezed her hand, hoping. Her eyes fell to their fingers interlaced, unnerved.   

“You tell me you are alive and it’s not something I can believe easily. I have prison walls more real than you. I killed you on the beach.”

“River Song could walk out of prison as if the walls weren’t there,” he mechanically quipped.

“And I can walk through them.” A faint smile passed her eyes, barely brushing the lips. A remembrance of a date they had, will have and _when was time rewritten?_ “That’s what I am saying. You are not _real_. _”_ She bounced down from a stone, colliding into him. “ _Hell_ , I have phantasms thicker than you, fixed in silence, and I can’t even _see_ them.”

He was not easy to believe in _alive_. Not for her, despite her hand still fitting _adamantly_ in his. He could hear his hearts pumping in ears.

“I imagined you out of guilt.”

His feet pulled him away, tripping. Her arm stretched out between them, taut.

“River…”

“It’s okay. I am merely repeating words they uttered in the courtroom, but with dread rather than compassion.”

Denial, dissociation, fantasy, he became to her. He closed his eyes, wanting to scream out loud, but the walls were wearing so thin around them the echo might destroy a fresco.

Everything there was made of echoes. The streets were still furrowed with the passing of carriages and carts, even if the dust and blades of grass nestling between the elevated cobblestones were young. Her grief even was new. On his face superimposed his twice dead eyes. It was easier to believe for her. A layer of reality had fallen and crusted atop a _dream_ , solidified in a shape her eyes could read out of habit: she was a psychopath.

 _Of course_ , she killed the Doctor.

At some point, her self-disgust had gotten the better of them. He winced.

“No, no, no. You _never_ killed me, River. I am here.”

She trained her eyes to his at last. There was wistfulness and resignation, still a mischievousness he knew she had for him _only_.

“I brought you back; it’s different.”

His lips parted with a pop.

Jerking up, his hands rushed to the sides of her face and did not relinquish. River would not let go of his right hand. He stroked, kneaded, brushed. It was no use. Brought to a tenderness deceiving what he considered for long the worst case scenario in risk-taking, he simply held. Aghast. At loss. He could probably encase her for an eternity between his palms and keep them thus cupped, useless in their rigidity, but at least they would retain her shape.

 “River, the alternate timeline. On top of the pyramid, I _married_ you.”

He didn’t care what could hear them, he needed her to know.  He had fought on the pyramids, keeping her in the dark, at any price. Hurting her, failing his Ponds. Her face when he had told her finally, understood he would live and accept her. All in vain. She had forgotten.

“I remember a solemn oath taken on a book. I remember answering I do. Those words were not wedding vows.” River was very calm in murdering him all over again. “I remember when you fall. I remember when my hair falls.”

“They cut your hair?” His breath hitched. He felt like grasping at every devilish details, of hair too short and hands too clenched. To distract himself from what was unfolding there.

“Hygiene and security protocol. Apparently, a prisoner smuggled in scissors.”

“In hair?”

She nodded.

He burst out of laughter, not containing the ridicule within his brain, where River and her victorious face on the beach were dancing around her current empty stare. He could not bring the images together, as if accepting the state of things she absent-mindedly enforced. By simply forgetting.

River was alone in Pompeii, as in her cell. She creates the Doctor in her cell, and the suspended city.

She is afraid of never seeing him again. It’s cold in prison. The worst part is finding walls old and scratched as hundreds of lives wore themselves there. In the irregularities and cracks, she is bored, she is lonely; she tries to find his face. Instead she sees others’ words carved. Words of love or hate. Directed at her, at every other her that stood between those walls. But never his again.

He would lose his face on less empty walls.

He shook his head, denying again.

“I didn’t call?”

“You don’t call.”

In Pompeii, candidates painted their promises on walls in red and black, and never had the time to keep them. The city never changed. But River had all the time to.

 _He_ did not even believe in the possibility for him to change or grow. He stumbled from trauma to trauma.

What was left of him, worn by years and losses, was a frame impacted by shocks, one after the other, and remodelled. He forgot what the painting hung before, long gone, had looked like. River was an impact; River was all the impacts that counted, the ones that created angles and articulations where a straight line had been before. Gallifrey had been the first. He did not develop anymore.

In jail, Riverhad _time_ to accept his death.

“You thought I was dead. You thought you had killed me. But you still got out.” He gathered all his willpower not to make it sound like an accusation, failed selfishly. The River he knew despised herself for what she did, and staid in prison for what she did. He could not bring himself to despise him for feeling ill when she allowed herself not to be destroyed by his death.

He pulled her closer, his heels bumping into a pebble and sending it clicking against the side-walk. Her pupils were carefully gliding long the curve of her lids. She wavered in her serenity.

“In the world where I kill you, I do not marry you.” She was not expected to mourn for someone who never was her husband. He could forgive her, until the words fell from her mouth:

“I fought it. You were dead and it was distracting from life.”

The guiltier part of him felt proud of her for overcoming her despair. He was dead, she carried on. Over his dead body. It still hurt. Why did River always have to be strong over his dead body? In the Library, she had been so stupidly strong and he had not yet recovered.  

“River, how long has it been since...”

She huffed, annoyed or embarrassed. Her reality was tepid at the moment, a solid canvas of cells and corridors, faces turned downwards, echoes of steps.

“I have been trialled for months now, despite claiming entire responsibility. I was not... well for a while. And one day, at court, I felt better, much better. I had forgotten _why_ it had to hurt so much, you being dead. The ache was replaced by the dull pain, certain, of knowing I was forgetting you.” She smiled. “Silly, I had met you twice only.”

Her eyes squinted. Two meetings, turning points, two deaths. It _was_ silly _._ And he was spiralling out of his mind.

“But you come back, don’t you? Younger versions of you.” Her free hand waved in the air. “Out of order, it’s confusing.”   

She trailed her hand down his back, pushing him in the street, setting them in motion again. The rain had started again, greying the ochre dust at their feet, sending the tourists scurrying to the sparse shelters.

“It doesn’t work quite so easily, “she added, wistful. “I _pretend_ I did not kill you. It almost feels real. I come up with the most incredible alternatives.” His lungs entirely emptied of air. He could almost see her imagining area 52, Cleopatra, the beacon…

She glanced up at him, furtively. “I’m already forgetting you. It doesn’t matter.”

He finished for her. _Because he wears all the faces of all the men she ever loved. She has allowed herself to love him here and now, dead, only because she will forget him._

_Oh, River._

“You say that with such coldness.”

“I don’t say it with any coldness.”

Pompeii was miserable under the timid rain, eroding. He was miserable and River kept dragging him by the hand. Something beeped in her pocket and she took an abrupt turn, slowing down to keep him close as she spoke.

“I hold on too hard.” Her unspoken confession: keeping him with her hurt. “You fade away. There’s nothing I can do.”

With terse horror, he became aware that he had never seen River this sincere, and that it was entirely due to him being nothing but a ghost. Worse, such sincerity was wrapped in a composure that made it impossible to conceal the sociopath underneath. On the witness stand. Psychiatrist on the right.

He thought Pompeii had been his courtroom, the open counter to his inconceivable crimes, recreated.

It was hers. Another corridor between cells, stop-over on her trial. The still-born place where she was used to meeting his ghost.  Where her guilt allowed her to roam her affections for him.

She brought him back indeed.

“Nea is waiting for me at the temple of Venus.” Her eyes winked at him, content again. “Walk with me?”

He flicked a wrist in approval, mindless. For the moment, he was cloaked in himself to the point of forgetting everything around them. Including her.

His guilt had never been enough, he thought. He used to treat River with defiance. He did not say it to Rose. He never made it up to Jack, or Sarah-Jane, or Jo, or Jamie, or Susan... And Gallifrey. When all was said and done, he knew he would not always choose to _save_ Gallifrey.

He could swallow centuries of bile and sweat, formed on his lips and on his brows, drops eased out of his system by children with young eyes and fresh ideals. People change and this is something he will always have to fight, taking decision he should not be taking. Facing the consequences, good or bad, as sentence.

He received River’s first kiss in Stormcage as a punishment and lashed out at her on the Byzantium as a reward. She was right in considering him a ghost. His consistency in life was a faint.

On their way, their path crossed the grey recumbent again. One had a hand stretched, half lying, trying to reach out. He thought River’s last image of him in the data core room must not have been so different. And then time stopped for eternity.

In Pompeii, time is set in stone. Not because time stopped for a cramped eternity, but because archaeologists reset time by allowing it to bleed slowly out of the ruins. Pompeii weighs on him like a solace he could never offer himself.

When Gallifrey burns, Gallifrey is also cast in a plaster of time. Except no one can unearth it, and Gallifrey is perfectly unchanged in death.

Had he the power to break open the seal, the same fate would befall on Gallifrey as it had on Pompeii. A slow deterioration. Because the civilisation had burnt its own marrow under the fires of an endless war. If salvage was reasonable, they would haul bits and pieces only, shells bright and purple, but empty. Gallifrey’s time had passed the moment the people allowed themselves to become as greedy as the Daleks.

Nothing to salvage.

Ashes burnt the bodies and solidified in contact with the water inside. To preserve the shapes, one can always spill cement in the cavity. Jewels and beauties are lost. That was what he did to Gallifrey.

That’s what he did to River in the end.

Opening the door would only leave him with trinkets of what she was. In the end, he doubted he would try to get River out of the datacore. He could not watch time making her boring, or dead, or simply old, crumbling under the thin rain and dry sun of Pompeii.

The realisation caught his trachea and left him gasping. He held onto her for dear life and she was still running ahead, still believing him to be a ghost, maddeningly.

 _Turn back_ , he wanted to call. _Look back. At him._ That was what they did best, looking back. Or upside down. Anywhere but ahead.

_Turn back._

He didn’t call.

He could not face her knowing he would stun her in eternity. It was a decision he had needed to make. Even if he had no claim to it.

Leant against the antique pedestal, former temple of Venus, a woman with jet-black hair and an intricate design plastered on her uniform was checking a scanner, oblivious to the curious whispers the tourists have for her. River startled and threw her left hand in the air to signal her presence. The woman seemed bored.

River lurched forward, as if ready to dash away, but the moment the contact between their hands was broken at last, she stood still and turned back. Upset. Far from the serene indifference of the afternoon. She was looking at him with intense confusion, imprinting his feature on her irises. The contact was broken and he is still there, _ghosts don’t do that probably_. And she must have realised it.

The slow crashing of their bodies against each other came as a surprise. She hovered close, undecided, caving a little, breathing so near he could hear the dry swelling of saliva from her mouth. He did not invite her, out of exhaustion or resentment. Her nose came brushing against his lips, tentative, the ridge of his nose tangent to her eyelashes. The feeling of her breath washing his collar, blended with his own contained breath sent him in a place so familiar, immediately evident, there was no point in arguing with her perception of his reality. It doesn’t matter. It never should between them.

He knows older River believes _he is alive_. For now, a confused River, fresh from her trials, is willing to let herself imagine him, again and again, rather than letting him dead. Her mother’s daughter from the beginning. Whether the echoing of her hearts against his is nothing but a murmur doesn’t  count.

The tip of her nose nudges his mouth open, before dabbing up gently long his cheek. Her lips take him, aghast, achingly ready, hers. She is not bothering to tease or bite, she goes straight for the hearts. Her whole image seems to expand in the contact; her smell, her hum, her taste, her gaze absent before, her touch –she is everywhere suddenly, his nape, his stomach, his ear. He reads all the signs, undiscriminating. Her body appears suddenly aware of his own, giving him shape, thickness, strength, when he spent the afternoon an indiscernible blend of impressions and worries.

She wasn’t prepared to miss him any longer. Real or not.

She took him and the ashes fell on Pompeii, he opened to her and time closed on Gallifrey. Phantasms always defeat reality; they do not need to exist.

When she broke the kiss, she looked at him straight in the eyes. A first for this visit; she saw him. He knew she had not remembered the alternative timeline yet. She still was willing to keep him by her side, dead. This existence, his, hers, worked without compromise, allowing space for forgetting and leaving to rest.

“You had your head elsewhere, you know that?” She beamed, inches from his face, forehead pressed against his, and he could feel the creases of her face changing on his skin. She tapped his cheek likely, let go of him and walked backwards for a few step, drinking in him. She shot her a smile before turning and hurrying to Nea, who acknowledged him with a nod.

With luck, Nea would ask River about this handsome fellow she kissed in Pompeii and River would believe he is alive.

They were both so fleeting in their tenderness, they might accidentally stop loving each other, over frozen bodies, or missing bodies. It was a conflagration he never could accept. She might have taught him a lesson this afternoon. He was quite sure he won’t be able to live by her standards.

Nothing is as dangerous as the tip-toeing impression things that once used to make him smile, even bogged him slightly in their oddness, would one day destroy him dully. He would cry over a millilitre of water warmed in the wrinkles of his palm.

***

Later, he goes in retirement over her absence, when his last body doesn’t have the time. Later, he keeps her memory at bay, even when her seclusion is breached and allows her out of death.

Later, he disrupts the Universe and rewrites the outcome of the Time War.

But never dares to re-enter her tomb.


End file.
